writer and journalist

About

Josh is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul. He is Turkey/Caucasus editor at EurasiaNet and his articles also have appeared in Slate, The New York Times,, The Wilson Quarterly, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera America, Roads & Kingdoms, and Jane's Defence Weekly. He blogs on Eurasian defense and security at The Bug Pit. Follow him on Twitter at @joshuakucera, and on Instagram. See more here.

September 23, 2013

New Reporting From Tajikistan

I have had several pieces published recently from a reporting trip I took this spring to Tajikistan (thanks to a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting). One is for The Wilson Quarterly, on the proposed Rogun dam project.

Two decades after the demise of the Soviet Union, the region’s five now-independent states have become increasingly isolated from, if not hostile to, one another. Borders have hardened as corrupt governments, focused primarily on extracting as much wealth as they can from their own land and citizens, see no need to cooperate with their neighbors. As the outside world has become more involved in the region, each country has come to see its neighbors as competition for aid, investment, and geopolitical clout. And no two countries are more sharply at odds than Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

“It all started in the 1920s,” said one prominent Tajikistani intellectual when I asked about Rogun...

Another piece, on TheAtlantic.com, is on the conflict between the Pamiri people of Tajikistan's remote east and the country's central government. It erupted last year in a controversial military operation by Tajikistan's U.S.-backed special forces.

Just before dawn on July 24 of last year, the government of Tajikistan began a military operation in the small town of Khorog on the Afghanistan border. According to the government, the attack was targeted at four leaders of criminal groups involved in drug smuggling from Afghanistan, who were suspected of killing a local security official. It was the kind of operation the U.S. - worried about instability on Afghanistan's northern border - has been training and equipping Tajikistan's special forces units to carry out.

But to the people of Khorog, the operation looked very different. The scale of the attack - using helicopters, mortars, and the country's most elite soldiers - was clearly far beyond what was necessary to capture four men. Snipers on the mountains that rise steeply above the town shot at civilians. Phone and internet were cut off. One local civil society leader described huddling with his family in an interior room in his apartment; venturing to a window he saw the bodies of three neighbors - and a soldier's gun pointed at his window. "After that I understood: this wasn't between those leaders and the government, but between the government and the people," he recalled.

And finally, a dispatch from Murghab, on Tajikistan's border with China, on Roads and Kingdoms:

“This is the worst place in the world.”

I was in Murghab, Tajikistan, and although I don’t like to make blanket judgments like that, I could see his point. The restaurant we were in was pleasant and cozy, but I had had to flee into it to escape the whipping wind, hail and bitter cold of the late May day. My walk around the town had presented an unrelentingly bleak landscape. Abandoned houses with collapsed whitewashed walls that exposed the mud brick underneath. Women with scarves wrapped around their entire head—only a small slit for the eyes—against the wind and dust. Trash everywhere, including a disconcerting amount of animal parts—feet, horns, clumps of fur.

I had come to Murghab because of where it sits on the map: on the borders of China and Afghanistan in the Pamir Mountains, the furthest reach of the Russian/Soviet empire. Between the geopolitical tectonic plates of Russia and China, Murghab feels like a fault line.